Windows Seven and Mac...

[nadinbrzezinski]

Well I had to replace my cheap lappie (I cracked the motherboard when it fell in Mexico back in April).

So I went and got an El Cheapo puter for travel... and I had a choice... get XP. get Vista (shudders, no way) or Seven. So I went for seven, easier to secure from my lovely niece, long story.

Anyhow, what does this have to do with ahem Mac (apart of the fact that I wish Mac did release el cheapo machines for those of us who do not want to travel with far more expensive machines)... when we were told that Seven had a mac like experience... they are not kidding, insofar as the UI is concerned. They have also removed a few things from ahem vista... folks I will need to defrag my drive manually (and I'm ok with that, but if you were used to the niceties of not having to worry... well there is this performance hit... and Unix does it, but they can't figure how to do it.)

It still boots much slower than the three year old macbook but not that bad actually, for a windows machine, with only 1 meg of RAM and an ATOM processor. But it has not crashed... I have yet to see the dreaded screen of death. Oh and I installed Open Office on it... (Yes it came with a temp licence for Word... student edition... may just get student edition on sale if I can find it... or not who cares, oo does the job and I run it in all machines) It also runs my writing software fine, and by the way, it is truly a glorified word processor... for ahem travel, and of course not taking over my mom's puter, beyond maintainaince.

Ah just how many things will Redmond continue to ahem, borrow? And didn't they already settle ONCE with Cupertino? Oh the games... the games, the games...

[Deja Q]

1. They do - those are the lower-end Macbooks...

And windows vendors shove in enough crapware to subsidize their prices... even removing them and running ccleaner and defragler (like how best buy does as a $50 service) won't compact the registry... not to mention it'd take 50 attoseconds before the drive gets fragmented again...

I use Win7 under Parallels 5 - in some ways it tries to act like a Mac (and looks a lot like KDE too), but with the registry, file fragmenting, sloppy infrastructure, and everything else, it will never approach OS X in terms of speed and stability.

I looked at Atom processors. They're overrated. A Celeron at half the GHz rating processes more instructions per second...

Unix OSes do not fragment files. They look for contiguous space, then copy the files (or aborts to tell you that there isn't enough space). Windows just slops it all around, blindly, and says "Oopsie-doodles, I ran out of space, please re-do the copy and waste the same amount of time all over again".


1MB of RAM? No wonder it's slow, try 1GB... :D Sorry, couldn't resist, I know you meant 1GB.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Let me see, 900 for a bottom macbook

330 after taxes for the el cheapo computer... to take to a country where the mac, even a three year old machine gets people going... hmmm (And then there is TSA and border protection and their knack for keeping machines while coming back to the country)

No, Apple does not put out el cheapo machines....

And as I said the externalities does look and feel like yes Apple and KDE you are correct. I did not say a damn thing about other issues, under the hood.

And yes I meant 1 GB... sorry I am dating myself... my first machine was a 3086 back in the days. It had 512 of RAM (OOOHHH) and a 3.5 drive.... now you were talking... oh and it ran my word processor from... the floppy... OOOHHHH... and this is well before math co processors....

Did I mention IT WAS an early laptop that came under five pounds?

Oh and a graphical UI... you kid me right? Grow a pair and learn command language... young man.

AH yes the old CHKDSK command, useful... I wonder if this sucker will even recognize that. Though it does have a terminal, something that went away with Vista... they are giving control back to the user.

[av8rdave]

3. A fun little story....

My wife wanted a laptop for her birthday. She has envied my MacBook, and said she was interested in one. I told her that was fine, but since it was going to be exclusively HER computer, she should check out all of her options. I told her I'd take her to a dealer that sells both Macs and that other stuff, and she should talk to a few salespeople, tell then what she wanted to use it for, and let them take their best shots before deciding.

The first place we went was the PC part of the store. They had 8 netbooks sitting in a row - various manufacturers, all with Windows 7, all turned off for the time being. I walked down the row and turned all 8 of them on.

On 5 of them...that's right FIVE of the 8 Windows 7 machines, the bootup stalled. The messages varied from "Windows could not initialize because it was not shut down properly," to "Windows could not load because ____.dll file is missing, etc., etc."

My wife looked at me and said, "this is the crap I dread with a computer."

She's using her MacBook as we speak.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. I absolutely love my macbook

but when traveling abroad I just shudder at the replacement cost if anything happens.

Why the netbooks are a good option for that. Been using the samsung I got to finish setting it up the way I like it. The good part is that even the piece of writing software (windows program) that more or less ran in my mac under oh... cross over... now runs VERY WELL under Wine. So I am happy. Not even the software is an issue any longer.

And lord knows I use the netbook for a glorified word processor. Hell, the same goes for my macbook.

I also realize... I am too much of a geek... if they had it with Remix (Ubuntu) I would have gone for Ubuntu to be honest, or even mandriva.

[av8rdave]

5. For as much as I travel...

The netbook would be nice for the portability, but I so prefer the Mac OS. My son uses Ubuntu a lot and loves it, but there are too many aps I need for work that won't run under that. As it is, I still have to use Fusion so I can run a couple of Windows only aps for my job. I would love to be completely Microsoft - free!

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. And why I believe Mac is missing that market

the excuse, we will not put cheap components... but in reality if they released a netbook I am sure people would buy it.

The Macbook air was close... but... the price point made me go... you kid me right?

[av8rdave]

7. You're exactly right about that

The Mac tablet rumors are interesting, but from what I hear, even that will be about double a netbook pricewise.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Well at least these days having a mac machine

and having a win machine (with a few wine tweaks) allows me to use the same software.

:-)

Ok there are few programs that will not run on the other... but for the most part I have no issues there. At least wiht my writing sofware that is.